Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Weekly Update 05/08/2013

M.I.N.T (Mecha, Tactics, and Infantry):
Its been a busy week of development.

First there was a serious Mac based bug with the SFML framework that we use for cross platform window setup, input, and sound. Unfortunately this wasn't able to be resolved, but we we're able to cut out SFML and hook up a new cross platform windowing and input framework back into our core engine.

This means things like an external mouse or trackball on a Macbook Pro will actually work correctly, vs crashing the game, or doing nothing. :)

With those issues sorted, I ended up switching M.I.N.T from the previous Staggered map layout to the Diamond style map that is often seen in RTS games.

The main benefit of this change, being smooth perfect edges on the map, which are quite nice if your doing walls, or buildings along map edges. Something we are now heavily experimenting with.

Finally development on the M.I.N.T map editor has been frozen for now, as we focus on getting a core prototype up and running, to really work on the game mechanics design space. So instead we're now using a third party map editor, and have the basics of map loading working.